Three Years

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late… but that doesn’t change the fact that the date seems worth noting.

(Roughly) Three years ago:

 

We took a basic photography class on the actual day of our anniversary. Perhaps not the most romantic thing we could do, but we both learned a lot and enjoyed the class. I may expand on this later, but while I am thinking about it, it was somewhat embarrassing how little we knew about our camera. On the other hand, Heather is able to turn out amazing pictures just by letting the camera automatically configure it’s own settings, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a detriment.

Three years… A lot has changed in that time. I don’t think Heather and I could have ever guessed we would be where we are, doing what we are doing today three years ago. Makes thinking about the future seem both exciting, and futile as we aren’t going to see the interesting stuff coming anyway 🙂

To put it simply we have had a great three years, and can’t wait to find out what the next has in store 🙂

 

-Jordan

Scones

Posted on by Jordan

As you probably heard about somewhere along the way, there was a wedding a few weeks ago involving British royalty.

It wasn’t a significant event in my world,but the office Heather works in had a different take. They claim it was because of the recent addition of a Canadian to their ranks, what with the whole “Canada still recognizes the Queen” bit. I can’t say I completely buy that. I talk to Canadians every day, and while they may have been a tiny bit more aware of the event than I was, they did not demonstrate the boundless enthusiasm for it that my wife did.

Whatever their reason, Heather’s office decided to have a sort of party on the day of (because it happened on a Friday morning for those of us in CST). Outside the world of TV shows about offices, “office party” just means “bring food” and not much else. Normally I should say… Apparently they designated a couple to dress up as the bride and groom…. Suffice to say they went above and beyond with their plans for the royal wedding.

And this is where I come in. I have actually made scones a few times before, but I don’t think they ever made the blog. They fall into that grey area between sweets and bread, and I have periodically tried them as a way to share a desert with Heather. I have even gone so far as to try a savory scone recipe although it wound up being kind of a tough sell.

Heather apparently remembered the first batch of scones I made well enough to think they would be a great addition to an English themed party at work.

Basically I doubled this recipe, except without the raw sugar crystals on top. Using dried cranberries doesn’t add much sugar so the end result is Heather approved.

Doubling the recipe did involve a distressingly large portion of butter, but I can’t complain about the results. The reports that came back from Heather’s office were equally positive, so I don’t think anybody really missed the sugar sprinkles on top. Although, speaking of the butter, because the method I used to cut each scone involved patting out a circle and splitting it into eights, it made calculating the butter per scone distressingly easy. There ended up being three-fourths of a tablespoon of butter in each scone. It’s better when you are just vaguely aware that there is “a lot” of butter in something I suppose.

One last comment about scones, and then I will stop before this gets any more scatter brained… Scones aren’t very hard. If you can make biscuits from scratch using a recipe, you can make scones. Just you know… use a scone recipe.

-Jordan

Two Years

Posted on by Jordan

January 24th marked the end of our second year of marriage.

I just dug around the blog, and found that I never actually put up a post detailing the first year’s activities.

So, on year zero (the honeymoon) we were in Colorado skiing.

Year one, we went to a local “paint your own pottery” place. That wasn’t terrible, but the end results of Heather’s work: cute, my work: sad. I guess they will both last forever, and that’s something. The only downside is, someday our children will ask why we have a plate dad made in preschool arts-and-crafts.

Now that your up to speed, this year we did something outdoors again!

Oh wait, another tangent! When we set our wedding date in January, people often said things like “well at least you can go someplace warm on your honeymoon” or “yeah, but you can go on trips to the beach for your anniversary.”  I have to admit that I did little to kill off those ideas, because saying “Bah, you just need a better coat and to move around a little” isn’t really what they wanted to hear.

Right, so back to this year: Heather found out that the local parks department was hosting an outdoor winter activities workshop this past weekend. We thought it would be a fun alternative to dinner and a movie, so we headed up after church.

They had a really neat program going, and plenty of participants! The first station we encountered was snowshoeing, but they had every single pair of shoes already out, so we trudged on down the trail. Up next was ice fishing.

It didn’t take long to determine that ice fishing wasn’t going to be our thing. I should mention, as you can kind of see from the picture, we had a beautiful sunny day. It was still quite cold, but being outside in the sunlight was a wonderfully refreshing change from our normal lifestyle.

After checking our pole back in with the ranger, we headed over to the cross country ski station. As with the snowshoe station, they had every single item already out in the snow. We were able to put our names and shoe sizes on the board for later that day, letting us wander back over to the snow shoe station.

On the way we found the dog sled team, resting after their exhibition.

The snowshoe station had just a few shoes, but a few is enough for the two of us! Granted, the snow wasn’t anywhere deep enough to really need snow shoes, but we still gave them a try. 🙂

After a loop around the meadow behind the lodge, we headed back over to the cross country ski station. Even having our names on the list didn’t mean it was a painless process, but eventually we had two pair of boots, poles, and skis. We headed down the trail, having no idea what we were doing.

I guess we were just naturals though, because we moved on down the trail without much trouble 🙂 I may have fallen a few times, but that is the price you pay for finding out how fast you can go. Heather stayed on her feet the entire time, although I am sure she doesn’t know how fast she can go yet. We learned that the DNR rents out the skis any day they aren’t offering a free workshop like we were participating in, so maybe Heather can figure that out another day. 😉

-Jordan

Website Work!

Posted on by Jordan

I think I mentioned quite a while back that I was hoping to get a chance to revamp the main heatherandjordan.com site.

I have finally completed step one of that process by setting up an archive of the site in its current state. Not the most exciting thing ever, but I wanted to preserve the old wedding site. Anyone wanting to look is free to check it out here, but I should warn you that, unless something is broken, it will look exactly like the main site. I guess if you find a broken page let me know… I know the RSVP page is a little goofy, but I didn’t want to bother re-writing the php right now.

Sadly that was the easy part, as now I have to figure out what to replace the wedding pages with on the homepage. Hopefully I can come up with something soon.

-Jordan

Florida Wedding Pictures

Posted on by Jordan

Heather finished editing the pictures we brought back from Florida. I uploaded an album of the wedding related ones, it can be found: Here

Heather did a great job editing those. I am happy with a few of them, and I think careful cropping, and color adjustments did wonders for what you can see in the album. There are a handful of pictures that are disappointing because I know there was a much better picture three to five seconds earlier than the picture I took. Part of the problem was my camera being slow to boot up, and my not really managing the auto-focus. The major problem was just that I wasn’t really always in picture taking modes, so I didn’t have the camera out and ready, or I had it out but didn’t have it turned on.

Somewhere down the wish list for Heather and I is a much nicer camera. Although moving to something like an SLR style camera would take away a lot of the easy to carry, always with me aspects I like about my current compact camera. I suppose I shouldn’t worry too much, if we aren’t looking to get a camera for a while, it leaves time for all kinds of amazing advances in cameras! 🙂

-Jordan

Punt!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I made it back from Florida!

In the next day or two I hope to get a nice summary post up, but I am still recovering from the trip.

This post is mainly just to say I don’t see any hope of getting the gallery hosted on this site ordered properly in a timely manner. Having admitted that fact, I just pushed the entire Picasa gallery online, neatly side-stepping the entire issue.

The gallery can be found here

I plan to have a link to those off the main site in a day or so too.

For people wishing to order prints, I hope to get a handful of the best pictures from the wedding hosted here, in their full resolution glory, for that purpose. In the meantime, I can always e-mail them out if somebody knows what they want.

-Jordan

The Kansas City Reception

Posted on by Jordan

The last wedding related event is complete!

And what a fun event it was! I haven’t had time to get any pictures cleaned up to post, but wanted to get a post up anyway…

Heather’s parents did all the work to put together a reception for us in Kansas City. The timing was about perfect. Five weeks after the wedding, Heather and I had time to recover, but were still kind of in the wedding mindset I think.

The only negative was the weather. I suppose you could argue we got lucky with the wedding, but it was still annoying to have the only snow in months land on KC the day we were expecting people to drive in from all over to see us. Fortunately, the snow wasn’t too bad, and to our knowledge, nobody had any trouble outside of having to drive slower.

The event itself was kicked off by loading roughly 30 Gutschow friends and family into a bus, and driving to the location of the restaurant. Heather had expressed some skepticism as to the necessity of a bus before the event, but it turned out to be a really fun addition to the day. The mood on the bus was a lot of fun, and it gave a few more minutes to see people before the official event.

Once on location, Heather scrambled to finish up an epically long slide show of wedding pictures wile I configured a projector to display it. We managed to have everything ready before the official star time.

Once things got underway, everything kind of became a blur. It was so nice to see everyone, and I still cannot believe how quickly time passed. We never had time to talk to anyone as long as we would have liked, and probably failed to get around to everyone we should have. The number of people there was amazing, considering the snow, and the fact that many of the attendees had also been at the wedding. Heather and I were amazed by the dedication and support people showed towards us.

After the official event, we rode the bus back to the house, for more time with family (mostly Gutschow, but my parents and a few others came too!).  I can’t say as I really enjoy being the guest of honor at any event, but it was laid back enough to be rather enjoyable.

Heather and I cannot say how grateful we are to our parents, for everything they did to make the events surrounding the wedding, not to mention the wedding, come of better than we could have ever hoped for. We are also glad its over, as fun as it was, this past weekend left us both exhausted 🙂

-Jordan

note: The slide show from this event will be the core of a web album in the making, coming “soon”!

!!! PICTURES !!!

Posted on by Jordan

We have pictures from our wedding!

Well, ok we don’t have them yet, but they are posted on our photographers website. We expect to have a DVD with the full sized versions of the pictures for us to play with soon. For now you will just have to go check out the website, instructions here.

Heather and I are so happy to finally get to see them! There are some really great pictures, and so many we didn’t even realize got taken.

-Jordan

Marriage License And Picture News

Posted on by Jordan

After two plus weeks of waiting for something in the mail from the county clerk, we double checked with our pastor to make sure things had been mailed in properly. They had been, and mailed in promptly at that! He mentioned that we should check with another couple in the church who recently got married, because they had some issues. They strongly recommended we call, because apparently two copies of their “certified marriage certificate” got lost in the mail before they just went down to the office and picked one up.

Heather called the clerk’s office today, and found they had records of mailing our certificate just four days after the wedding. It seems the US Postal service has a special bin for loosing marriage certificates in. I will be making a special trip down town to try and obtain a copy of the certificate. If all goes well, Heather can begin the process of changing her name etc. that she has been dreading for months now 🙂

Also over the weekend, picture news!

We talked to our photographer, and she expects to have our pictures completed by this coming weekend! I don’t know if that will include posting pictures on her website, but it should at least include giving a CD of digital copies to us. I hope that means we can have a few pictures posted somewhere on this site over the weekend. Given the lackadaisical posting here though, we might be a little late getting pictures out. I will say though, Heather and I are very excited about the pictures, so there should be ample motivation.

-Jordan

Picture News!

Posted on by Jordan

Exciting stuff!

Heather has been watching the photography site, hoping that maybe some of our wedding pictures would pop up as example pictures as Cherie is working through our pictures. Her diligence paid off, and there are a few wedding pictures posted over at:

C Phelps Photography

I can’t deep-link to the pictures, but here is how you find them:

  1. Click on “Galleries”
  2. Select “happily ever after” from the listed galleries
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the pictures

As of this posting, pictures from our wedding are the last four in the gallery. Hope you all enjoy them, Heather and I certainly have!

-Jordan